Surely it is time to recognize that a plethora of guns results in a glut of gun crime?
Sigh. What sort of rational person cares about "gun crime?" Unless you've been listening to political talking points I can't even fathom your point of view. The relevant question is: does the availability of guns result in more or less violent crime and human suffering? Who cares if you're shot or killed with a pipe bomb if you're just as dead?
The individual American is not stupid, but the American society is being hoodwinked.
Or... just possibly... you're incorrect in your opinions?
We, in the 95% of the world that is not from the USA (i.e. the very great majority) wait in despair for you, as a society to grow up, and drop the almost childish desire for arms, exchanging it for an adult acceptance of the world's dangers.
Speaking for the world in general is a dangerous thing. Were you talking about Sweden perhaps, or Switzerland, or many of the other places with some of the best living conditions in the world and also with similar rates of gun ownership? Speaking for the world, I'd also like to welcome the US to more modern practices and a less violent and dangerous society. People of the US, keep your guns, but decriminalize recreation drugs, implement socialized medicine, and mitigate the enormous wealth disparity. Greatly reduce crime rates with these tactics as many other countries already have. Do not, however, bother listening to "jdkk" who is way off base.
Gun-licensed countries -- practically those with bans have far far lower crime.
Both of the links you provided do not support your assertion. Both articles reference gun crime only. Yes, violent crime with guns decreases as laws make guns less available, but in general violent crime in those localities increases overall. So if your goal is to stop people from being murdered with guns, then yup gun bans help. If, however, you have the more sensible goal of stopping people from being murdered in general, then no they don't make sense.
I know it's idealistic but I would like it if NO ONE other than police & Military had guns.
Because you trust the military and police more than the average person? Do you know many people in either group?
Has anyone ever heard of a drive by stabbing?
Even assuming you could make all guns not owned by the police and military vanish and stop any more from ever entering the country you would succeed only in increasing violent crime. Look at South America and the devastating results of drive by pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails. More innocent bystanders are hit by shrapnel or seriously burned by these less directed attacks than by drive by shootings
I won't have a gun in my house.
Good for you. You choosing not to have one and I choosing to have one is called "freedom." You see, we each make the choice we think is right. Laws stopping either of us from making this choice is the lack of freedom.
It offends me that I "need to have a gun" because this nation has made it so easy for criminals to get them.
So what? Most of the country does not want to quadruple taxes to pay for enough police officers all the time to stop people from illegally getting guns. Even if they did, strict gun control statistically correlates with a slight increase in overall violent crime, especially beatings and a medium to large increase in robberies. What you are offended by (or should be) is the combination of human nature and society that motivates people to commit violence in the first place. Guns are an intermediate step. If you want to solve the real problem figure out why people commit violence and why they don't.
The argument that we need to be able to defend ourselves against our government is ridiculous, how well does a machine gun do against a cruise missile?
Ask the vietnamese. Small arms are an effective weapon in a civil war and greatly decrease the risk of an oppressive totalitarian regime by increasing the danger to those instituting such a system. If the government fires a cruise missile in downtown Washington DC, they just made more rebels than they killed including, perhaps, some of the soldiers being ordered to do it. A soldier who may be willing to go arrest a 16 year old kid for protesting because his freedom of speech has been taken away, may be a lot less willing to risk getting shot at while trying to kill a 16 year old kid who is fighting to regain his freedom of speech. It would be nice to think that an American soldier would do the right thing in either case, but the reality is something else.
If humans would spend as much time, money, and effort with feeding children as they are with giving third world countries hand cranked computers with pretty picture interfaces, the world would be a better place.
A smart businessman looks for return on investment. Right now many countries spend huge amounts providing food to other countries. This investment is much larger than the OLPC project. The food donated in this way destroys the local market for food, decimating the remains of the agricultural sector (the only real industry in many places) and making them dependent upon future handouts. The way around this is to provide them with more the the results of an industry, but with all the tools and knowledge necessary to build the industry from scratch. For agriculture that can compete, this means the entire industrial base to make farm equipment, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, GM foods, etc. This investment would be huge, but some level of it is provided in some places. Alternately, for a relatively tiny investment we can provide them with all the tools and knowledge needed to compete in the computer/intellectual property market. The OLPC project gives them everything needed to gain education and learn to create applications and information on computers.
Thank you for the green foot pedal computer with the fishes on the screen! I wish I could eat them...I am so hungry...
Sorry, but your world view is out of date. For the most part, people do have food. They just don't have jobs so they can build a life... partly because we gave them food. It is humane to give starving people food, but it is much better to give starving people both food and a means of making money so they can buy their own food in future.
The term "aqua" is used by different people to refer to different bits of OS X. In this case it seems they were using it to refer to the look and feel of the UI. Since Leopard includes a resolution independent UI and taking advantage of that requires vector graphics for elements and also may warrant some other changes to take advantage of this feature, it is almost a given that Apple will update the look and feel along with the new graphics, rather than creating vector version of the old ones.
But they're still nuts, because they can marshall these cogent, well-reasoned, well-documented arguments against gun control, and tell you why the 2nd Amendment is necessary for freedom, but they consider anyone who supports any of the other nine amendments to be godless liberal hippies who hate America.
You have just demonstrated the logical fallacy of argument by association. I do not believe you have psychic powers sufficient that you know what everyone who you label a "gun nut" believes. I don't believe that "most people" all hold the same beliefs about various rights. What you are doing is the same as people have done throughout history. You are arguing against a hypothetical person and the beliefs you assume this person holds as a representative of a huge group of individuals. By demonizing that person, you then try to justify your support or lack of support when you admit that is unethical.
Uh huh, and other countries that don't have gun bans are just as prevalent to violent crime as the US [/sarcasm]. The US has the highest number of murders/violent deaths in any western country by far, and (apart from canada) is the only one with such easy availability of guns.
Actually, if you objectively researched this it is obviously not the case. Some of the countries with the lowest violent crime have nearly as high of gun ownership as the US. If you are serious about educating yourself instead of trying to find support for the opinion you already have take a look at the real correlations between violent crime and other criteria. You'll see that as potential remedies you'd first want to consider socialized healthcare, decriminalization of recreational drugs (not necessarily legalization), and reduced wealth disparity via either the aforementioned socialism perhaps combined with progressive inheritance taxes. Looking at the numbers that have not been discredited by peer review you'll actually see a slight negative correlation between gun ownership levels and violent crime.
Now I'm not saying that guns are responsible for all the shootings, but taking them away is the easiest deterrant to stop stupid/violent/desperate people from going on shooting rampages or holding up liquor stores - it's either that or a nation-wide stability test with the mandatory jailing of those who fail.
You assert this, but I've never seen data to support it. Usually what happens in the case of a new gun ban is a slight decrease in crimes committed with guns with a medium sized increase in violent crimes committed with other weapons and a large increase in robberies. If your goal is to stop gun crimes, great, but you'll have done so while creating a net increase in violent crime in general. Trying to stop a crime by attacking one of the tools is idiotic in my opinion. You need to address the motivations for said crimes to effect a real change. Enough robberies already occur with illegally purchased guns or with other implements so that for the typical criminal, fewer legal guns actually gives them more motivation not less. Think about it from their point of view. They don't think they'll be caught and punished or they wouldn't do it in the first place. Since most don't have a legal gun and even if they do committing a crime with it is an additional crime, how does banning guns deter them? If anything it reduces one motivation to not commit a robbery, that being the chances that they will be shot by a store owner.
In fact, we (Australia) relatively recently (roughly 10 years ago) had a national gun ban scheme... we've seen a MASSIVE drop in the number of murders per year.
That makes one data point, but have you actually looked at the available data set from around the world? Have you looked at the changes to the other, correlative items I mentioned? How have they changed over that time. Finally, while I'm not overly familiar with Australia in general, I do remember seeing a piece about politically motivated, drastic changes to the way they recorded and reported violent crime statistics, making some of the claims of a large drop very questionable.
Whatever the case, from my look at the data and the studies I've read I think you're wrong about gun control as an effective means of motivating decreased crime. Further, I think there are a lot easier and less socially dangerous changes to initiate, if people would only educate themselves on the issues.
Let's hope we just did that, because if we don't turn around now, we'll crash, and we'll crash bad.
I'd argue that we're experiencing the fallout of the wealth disparity right now. We have a huge portion of our society in prison and spend more money trying to enforce the prohibition on illicit drugs than it would take to provide health care and free eduction to the entire country. I don't suspect electing democrats or republicans will make much difference since both are getting to power by a system that ensures corruption (elected with campaign contributions from lobbyists). This redirects, to some degree, the will of the people and endangers the system as a whole. The chances of it being replaced with something better are pretty slim as I see them.
Either at the point where people flee this country to get basic services, or at the point where we vote in communists and start executing the rich, or both.
As for "communists" I'm always leery of the term. Communism has been the subject of so much propaganda and fear tactics that rational discourse on the subject is rare. Here's an interesting assertion, the US has always practiced communism on such a wide scale that almost ever person in the country has participated. Let me explain. Communism is simply a group sharing some or all resources and collectively making decisions about the use of those resources. The most common communist cell in the US is a family. Rarely does a family live each in their own home, buying groceries, phone lines, cars, TVs, etc. separately. On such a small scale, sharing and collectively making decisions about resources is a no-brainer. Most people never even consider an alternative.
Now when most people think of the term "communist" they think of communist extremists who advocated enormous communist cell sizes, often encompassing entire nations. At that scale the resources saved by sharing and removing duplication are overshadowed by the dangers of unmotivated decision making and the threat of totalitarianism from the takeover of that already consolidated decision making. It simply does not work. In between lies a middle ground. The question an economist asks is not "should we be communists" but "what is the ideal communist cell size for us." In the US cells are shrinking from traditional sizes as nontraditional families become more common and they are growing from traditional sizes as extended families regain popularity due to economic hardship. Even larger communist cell sizes in the form of communes and monasteries actually provide some of the best living conditions in the US, by some people's opinions.
To further complicate the issue, there is socialism, which many people think is the same thing as communism. It is not. It is the society as a whole gathering up resources and spending them collectively. In the US this is education, welfare, medicare, military expenses, police, roads, prisons, etc. Again, no sensible economist asks if we should be socialists, but how much socialism is ideal and how it should be collected and directed.
I'd be interested to read more about that particular case study.
Try Google for "Muhammad Yunus." He won the nobel peace prize this year for the economic study to which I was referring.
One important difference however is the fact that you say it's a loan. When those people receive $27 dollars, I assume they have to pay it back.
Well it was $27 for the whole village, not for each person. Basically he found that he could pay off one person's debt which they spent their entire life paying interest on for only a few dollars, so he just gave them the money needed and changed the entire village's economy. Later he came up with the idea of loaning tiny amounts to 5 individuals with no interest in a locality and then when they repaid it, the money was loaned to someone else in the same place. This provided them with social pressure from their neighbors to pay off the loans. It has worked amazingly well.
Taxing the rich and redistributing their assets doesn't sound like a loan to me though. It sounds like a handout.
Ever heard the phrase "it takes money to make money?" Economists call this the monetary condensation principal. I'm born to a poor family. I work hard go to college buy a home and make all the right economic choices. Over the course of my life nearly half my earnings are spent paying interest on loans for college and that home. That is the best case scenario. At the same time another person is born into a rich family and inherits a few million bucks. They never have to work a day in their life because by proxy they are loaning me the money to go to college and buy a home and collecting interest. I work hard. They don't work. My hard work and circumstance pays them as much money as it does me. Over the long haul this means money consolidates and a very few people have larger and larger shares of the pie while the majority spend more and more of their income paying interest to those few. Usually this ends with a bloody revolution when the poor are tired of it.
Everyone starting out equally is not a handout. Obviously 100% inheritance tax and everyone starting with the same stake in life would require enormous changes to society, but simply taxing the inheritance from the very rich provides most of the benefit with a lot less complex meddling from the government.
Those people will need another handout next month. And the next. Unless people are forced to use those funds for education or in some other way improve their status, the money will end up right back in the hands of the wealthy.
Perhaps that is so and perhaps not. The thing is, most people don't have much of a chance. I described my economics earlier and $20K to start out would easily save me $60K in interest over my lifetime. Most people need more financial education and credit cards suck a lot more money from the poor and give it to the rich than college and home loans do. All of it, however, is the end result of wealth disparity and most wealth disparity is the result of inheritance. And I'm not asking that wealth disparity be abolished. It is a good thing in principal because it motivates innovation and hard work. The problem is due to wealth condensation wealth disparity increased due not to hard work, but simply due to circumstance. This retards innovation and removes the incentive for hard work. I say let a child of a millionaire inherit $100K and they will have incentive to do something with their life and work hard, benefiting society. Likewise let the child of a destitute woman in Detroit inherit $10K from that same millionaire and have enough money to pay for an apartment for a while while they go to school without having to spend the rest f their life paying off the debt it generates.
Actually no. If you look at the US over the past 150 years it has gone up and down between decades. In point of fact, the disparity is about the same today as it was 100 years ago.
150 years seems like a cherry picked number. It coincides with the end of slavery in the US, which was a revolution of sorts and one of the violent upheavals where wealth was forcibly redistributed. It was followed by quite a bit of progress as the descendants of the freed gained on the rest of society. If you look at the last 50 years, however, you'll see most estimates show wage disparity has about doubled and wealth disparity tripled.
First, these countries with "higher standards of living" are small, essentially homogoneous, and have economies that are largely dependent on extraction of natural resources (and much less so with developing new technologies, medicines, services, etc).
The first point you bring up is a myth, long ago put to rest, I'd thought. As for the economies, they vary quite a bit as does the nature of their stance on technology and employment.
Second, the "higher standards of living" are essentially defined by arbitrary equations and do not necessarily tell you the complete picture
True, enough, but they are the best consensus we have.
Third, just because you think it "works" for them, does not mean they did better under these systems.
Since we have historical records of numerous localities that have changed their economic policies over time we have some pretty well normalized ideas about how certain economic policies are likely to effect other "quality of living issues." For example, if you are looking at violent crime you'll see the single strongest correlation between it and any other factor anyone has documented is wealth disparity. I don't know a serious sociologist that has even argued this in decades.
Fourth, you seem to assume that equality itself should be the end goal and not actual absolute improvement overtime.
Not at all. I argue that if you're looking to promote the greater good for the most people we should look to a certain level of socialism and communism; enough to balance out wealth condensation and keep the society stable and nonviolent, while not so much that it has a damping effect upon growth and innovation. The US has practiced socialism in the form of education, police, roads, industry subsidies, welfare, social security, prisons, and military for a long time. The level of this socialism is not particularly low, but it is directed in different ways than seem ideal. The US has historically practiced communism on the level of small communities and nuclear and extended families. That communist cell size has been shrinking (although with current trends are moving away from the nuclear family and towards both smaller and larger cells).
From a purely economic standpoint then, looking to "tweak the system" so to speak, I'd look to directing more health care, education, and welfare and away from prisons and industry subsidies. I'd further drastically increase the inheritance tax on the very high end and could be fairly well assured that there would be a corresponding drop in violent crime. I'd move towards more capitalism by removing strict government prohibitions on certain markets like recreational drugs. All these policies have had very positive results elsewhere and likely would in the US.
Your example is very much detached from reality. The great majority of wealth does not lie with the uber-uber-rich (billionaires), but from the lesser known multi-millionaires and millionare variety. There are only about 700 billionaires in the US (with an average networth of ~3.2b). Presuming your wet-dream could materialize and you could liquidate the assets of these billionaires at 100% all at once (ignoring for a minute that they'd have to die and that most of their wealth is just on paper), that would only give those 100m "poor" about 22K per person. This is hardly enough for anyone
If the wealth of the millionaire were essentially illegitimate, the state would not need any further rationale for his expropriation. On the other hand, if he were in some sense entitled to his astounding fortune, what moral arguments could yet be brought to bear that would override his right to property?
I reject the ethical argument that a person is entitled to inheritance since historically there has never been a zeroing of wealth followed by fair dealings which led to its distribution. Wealth has been distributed as far back as we know by people killing, robbing, enslaving etc. Should one person be born to riches while another is born to debt simply because 500 years ago the ancestors of one slaughtered the ancestors of another and the profit of that crime was never returned and has been gaining the evildoer's ancestors interest ever since?
No the moral high ground is a swamp so economy needs to be a matter of practicality that brings benefit to the people in general. As such it is certainly the place of the state to govern and restrict inheritance as much as is beneficial for society.
You seem to think that most wealthy people are that way because they inherited it. Less than 20% of millionaires inherited their wealth.
Your numbers are misleading because while true, they sidestep the issue. If 50% of the wealth is controlled by 2% of the people, the question is, how many of that 2% inherited versus made it through hard work from a modest start? Switching from worldwide numbers to the US, because I happen to have read those numbers for the US and have never seen them on a worldwide basis, I think it was less than 1 in 20 of the top 1.5% of the US which control hugely disproportionate amounts of money did not have a parent in that 1.5%. Statistically speaking the way to be wealthy is to have been born wealthy. We'd all like for the American dream of hard work leading to success to hold true, but realistically it is not the case most of the time. Circumstances of birth are more important that genetics, education, or hard work.
You split 8B between 100M people, that's $80 each. Are you saying everyone would be significantly better off if they had just $80 more?
Yes, actually. If you've ever read about microloans that are having a huge impact on Africa, an individual turned a village of 42 people from perpetual debt to profitability with only $27 dollars. The most popular of these programs now offer loans in the range of $25-$500 in much of the third world. That is not to say $80 would be enough everywhere, or that it needs to be evenly distributed, only that it is enough to make a huge difference to the poorest people and that is the ballpark sort of figures we should be looking at.
Your comment does not really deserve a reply being a joke and redundant at the same time, but if you've seen Apple's recent mice I'd say they are of the same mentality as the Wiimote. That is to say, they are designed to be easy and accessible to everyone and to encourage developers to do the right thing. At the same time, they can easily enable power users to have the myriad buttons they need and want. In fact, Apple's "mighty mouse" is the only mouse I've ever seen where a shared computer can have one hardware mouse with one button for kids and novices and multiple buttons for expert users. I've seen firsthand what happens when novice users try to operate one of those four button designs favored by power users and I've cursed at trying to use the same mouse (as I'm accustomed to three or more). I find it sad that people still drag this old horse out of the closet, even if they're trying to be funny.
After the cell processor was more or less confirmed to win the battle for the console, but before Apple announced the switch to Intel this move seemed like a no-brainer. A virtual Nintendo console built into every mac would have been a real win. Now, however, the development for both the Wii and the Mac virtual console might be too hard. If Apple, Nintendo, and Sony were willing to shake hands in order to deliver a combined kick to Microsoft's groin they could to it as follows: build a single development platform on top of OpenGL and similar technologies that allow a game developer to target the Wii, Mac, Linux, Windows, and PS3 with minimal effort. Promote it like hell and hand it out to every college student everywhere. All the players are already behind OpenGL in one way or another. This would have a similar, but more widespread effect and threaten some of MS's lock-in with respect to their crown jewels (Windows). But then I've always been one of those "a strong offense..." types.
You can take somebody's money because... it is advantageous for you to do so? (Isn't there a word for people who do that?)
Freedom fighters?
Look, life isn't fair. Some people are born smarter or better looking than others. There is not a lot society can do about that. On the extremes, socialism usually serves to temper the harshness, the mentally handicapped are fed and clothed and the disfigured are given what surgeries are possible to help them live a normal life. With wealth, however, the disparity is wholly the creation of society. One person inherits 8 billion dollars and never works a day in their life. Another is born into $180 of debt and spends the rest of their life working as a slave unable to pay off the interest on it. No one in their right mind thinks that is fair. Worse yet, from an economics perspective, in a purely capitalist system this disparity continually increases. Historically, this increases until the majority are in such bad shape they revolt, kill the wealthy and redistribute it. Then the cycle begins again.
Modern economies have established a better balance of capitalism, socialism, and communism. In some of the places with the highest standards of living you'll find socialism that effectively negates the wealth condensation principal. That is to say, wealth disparity is not increasing in those places. This is usually accomplished by socialized healthcare, education and progressive inheritance taxes. In the above extreme example, imagine if instead of inheriting 8 billion dollars, our privileged child inherited 50 million dollars. The rest of the wealth was redistributed to those born incredibly poor. So now you have one person still obscenely wealthy who never has to work a day in their life and 100 million people who would have been born into perpetual debt, each with a sufficiently large stake to begin life with a small farm to work or a little shop. As a result, maybe some of those people don't rise up and kill the son of the privileged and simply take the money to be less equitably redistributed.
The principal is hard to argue against, it is simply a matter of establishing the ideal balance. The problem being, the laws are not actually created democratically by and for the people, in most cases, but instead are created by the ultra wealthy. Just take a look at how many people in the top levels of our government were not born into that inherited aristocracy.
This might work to some degree, but a lot of security problems occur in situations where there are warnings. All it takes is for an application to tell users, "This won't work unless you say 'ok'," and people will click on 'ok'. It might not make sense, but people don't understand computers to begin with, so if their spyware-toting emoticon program tells them to do something, they'll often do it.
Yes, this is true, especially for Windows users. Windows has ignored the UI component of security to an absurd degree. If you ever see the choice (OK)(Cancel) then the OS has failed. This is a system that operant conditions people to click "OK." Every dialogue box should be useful, their appearance should be rare, every comment should be in plain English, and every button should be an action unique to that dialogue, like "allow this program to send mail" instead of "OK."
In order to be reasonably successful, the ACL would need to be lenient enough that, indeed, it almost never triggered a user prompt. If users get prompted for half of their installations, they'll start clicking 'ok' out of habit.
Yeah, users should always have to read the button to decide which option to pick. As for the rarity, they need to be rare and so do other dialogue boxes. A start would be removing all the dialogues that only have the option "OK" as they are useless and don't give the user any choice. They serve only to make other dialogues less effective. Realistically, however, most people do not install many items of software on their computers, so this sort of a prompt would be fairly rare for the average user. It will take some time to uncondition everyone, but the sooner we start the sooner it will make a real difference.
In order to be reasonably successful, the ACL would need to be lenient enough that, indeed, it almost never triggered a user prompt. If users get prompted for half of their installations, they'll start clicking 'ok' out of habit.
Agreed. On Windows, Microsoft needs to bend over backwards to make such a system available to all developers and certifiers, including open source projects by default if they wish to avoid breaking antitrust law. I have no confidence at all that they will do this however. Luckily, other OS's will move this way and perhaps take some market share.
And the whole thing was stupid. I was an administrator on the machine, and it just wouldn't let me do ordinary things without effort. So this, apparently, is Microsoft's solution to security: make it hard to do simple things, even if you have an administrator account.
Yeah, making risky behaviors difficult is a flawed security design. The projects that have implemented this so far, like Solaris, SELinux, TrustedBSD, etc. have taken care to make sure the user can alter the default trust levels for different types of software and override those defaults for any given software, without any difficulty. I'm actually counting on Apple to do this properly and then have other's copy the UI they develop for it. They had documents about a MAC and application signing framework in their OS X 10.5 info for developers right up until two days ago when it vanished from their site. Hopefully this does not mean the feature was yanked, but only hidden until the announcement.
So services and programs either have access to user files or they don't.
That level of security granularity is no longer sufficient on Windows due to the high malware rate. The access should be calculated based upon a number of factors. First a given service or program should be granted a trust level based upon if it was a pre-instal app, signed and certified app from a given authority, signed app, or unsigned app. These should correspond to a default ACL for access to files and other resources. A good default for a signed but not certified app, might be access only to files that program itself created. Further, each program's ACL needs to be customizable. When a program wants to exceed its ACL, the user needs to be informed and asked. This should be a pretty rare occurrence for most users. "The program "IE_porn_toolbar6" wants access to access your e-mail address book This program is signed as belonging to "donkeysystems.net" but has not been certified as safe by anyone. (Stop it from accessing my e-mail addresses)(Let it read them once, but not write to them)(Let it read and write my e-mail addresses whenever it wants)(Advanced options)."
You'll note how the above message would not be triggered by 99% or more of even unsigned applications that are not malware and how the message is delivered in plain English with actions for buttons. This basic concept is a mixture of Application Signing and Mandatory Access Controls. Neither is widely used but the underlying plumbing has been available for many years. If MS had any motivation to solve their malware problem, this would take care of most of it.
You know it actually lends you credibility when you say, "I was wrong and I admit it" when you are caught making factually incorrect statements.
Are you suggesting that Linux doesn't have a relatively tiny number of ignorant users ? Or that OS X doesn't have a relatively tiny market share ? Or are you arguing these two aspects of "security" are not significant ?
I'm suggesting that no one has ever presented any evidence that marketshare is a significant contributing factor to the security of those platforms, or (if it is significant) how significant that one factor is.
Neither OS X, nor the vast majority of Linux installations, "contain trojans" in any meaningful way.
True, but neither most OS X machines nor most Linux machines are constantly being infected by trojans, so there isn't a lot of demand. It would be nice if the features used to contain trojans became more widespread and integrated on those platforms, but doing so is proactive security addressing a problem that has not really materialized yet. Not implementing them on Windows is simply negligence and lack of motivation on the part of MS.
Being that psychic OSes are still a ways off, I daresay you'll be waiting a while for the OS that "works properly for said user".
Why, OS X works properly for most people in this regard. So does Linux. It is simply a matter of giving the user enough information about what is happening and the right controls to do what they want for the tasks they normally do. There is no technical barrier to that. Psychic abilities are not needed as there are these things called mice, keyboards, and monitors.
An Operating System does not - and can not - know what the user *wants to do*. It only knows what the user has *told it to do*.
No, this is untrue. The OS knows what both the user and the OS programmer told it to do. Most users know nothing of the default settings on their computers, but they still function. In any case the problem is not one of the computer needing to do something neither the user or programmer has not told it, but of the OS needing the ability to do what the user tells it as well as the ability to inform the user when it does things.
So are Apple going to break all those old, unsigned legacy applications by stopping unsigned code from doing anything interesting, or are programs still going to be able to do pretty much anything they want ?
This is called a false dichotomy. We don't yet know what Apple is going to do, but you can bet it won't be either of the above. Most programs don't want to perform the behavior of malware, so simply restricting those behaviors by default will "break" only a few legacy apps. And by "break" I mean ask the user what they want it to be able to do and then do what the user tells it.
Here's the problem with going down the path of signed apps and strict controls (which is probably the closest thing to a real, workable "security improvement" I think I've ever seen you suggest): to be effective, it must lock out pretty much any software that doesn't originate from high profile, professional, commercial software developers, released after those strict controlers were implemented.
No it does not. Microsoft will probably got that route because it may profit them, but there is no motivation for other's to do so. Apple can maintain their own certificate signing authority and even package repository if they want. There is nothing to prevent users from adding more certifiers at whatever trust level they want. There is nothing stopping users from changing these levels for completely unsigned applications in general or for a given application. Even if a user runs a completely unsigned application they get in their e-mail, there is no reason to stop it from running by default. It can just be sandboxed so it needs explicit approval, with warnings to the user, if it tries to touch anything important or be
Oh, I'm not arguing that OS X's implementation is ideal, merely that this functionality should be universal. More important than any individual function like spell checking or grammar checking is the ability for arbitrary functions to be shared.
A much more important question is: why are you running random programs off the Internet?
Because it is the only way to get my job done. Programs from companies I don't trust, like Microsoft and Adobe are essential to my continued employment and there are no equivalent programs I trust. Even many open source projects have never been audited by anyone other than the original author. For all I know, they contain code to backdoor by computer.
It makes sense for trusted programs to have easy access to your address book...
No, it makes sense for me to be able to allow a program I trust access to my address book. It does not make sense for any program not pre-installed to have access by default unless there is some mechanism by which it can be considered trusted by automated policies.
...and untrusted programs should never be run in the first place.
And this is why security on computers sucks today. The mindset of "what users do is wrong lets change them" instead of figuring out what tasks users want to accomplish and designing the OS to let them do it securely. To maintain that an "all or nothing' security scheme is workable in this day of abundant malware is an absurdly bad idea.
It's not normal for me.;)
I don't know any major or even relatively major OS that gets managing applications right. OS X and Windows Lack a universal update system for applications. Windows and Linux lack ubiquitous, portable, compartmentalized applications. I think if someone merged the functionality of a good package manager, with an automated build process, with OpenStep we'd be pretty close to ideal functionality, but so far no one has.
All of this simply serves to reinforce my point, no OS's are not perfect and there is a lot of room for improvement.
I don't normally reply to my own posts, but I thought it might be interesting to note that apparently Apple pulled the mention of this feature from their Website. I don't know if that means it is not going to be in Leopard or if they're just keeping it all secret.
Like the one where the new Japanese digital camera chic could talk to the Mac but no tto the PC. Huh? Show me one digital camera available at the time of that commercial that did not work with a PC. Seriously...
Actually, my older camera did not work out of the box with either my brother's laptop or my friend's desktop when we tried to grab pictures from it. We had to download drivers to get it working in one case and gave up in the other. It did work just fine without installing any drivers on my mac laptop and my other friend's mac tower.
What can I do with it?
This is often an issue for people trying a new platform. They don't have a purpose and they don't plan to use it as their everyday machine. They don't need it at all. I've heard the same comment about Windows and Linux. So I Installed Vista on my MacBook Pro, and I can watch a DVD or something, but I'm not a PC gamer so what can I do with it?
Anyway... I think some people who might consider a Mac are seeign some of these ads and not believing them. Yes, PCs ARE fun. Yes, cameras work with Windows. Why are you fibbing to me?
Wait you believe some of the stuff you see on TV... during ads? Wow, we live in different worlds.
That seems wierd - perhaps it's the age of the iBook you got or the projector you own. My old Powerbook 667 MHz has never had problems with any projectors and I know my current Macbook can hook right into 1080p displays from experience.
Old ibooks only supported monitor mirroring, rather than multiple independent displays. As such, it would have restricted to the resolution of the ibook screen, unless he applied a firmware hack.
I feel like we've reached a design plateau with both Windows XP and MacOSX these days. They both do what they do extremely well, and most of the other needs can be satisfied by the applications themselves without changing the OS.
I strongly disagree. The progress in the OS field has been slow, but there is plenty of room for growth. OS X has numerous features that are part of and should be part of the OS that have not yet made their way to Windows. For example, system level services. Can you believe there are still OS's without spellchecking, grammar checking, etc. in all programs that use text? Also, there is the area of application management and security. By default some random program off the internet has access to read my e-mail address book and start sending mail? And someone thinks this is acceptable? There is no universal update service to keep all my software current and that is normal?
There is a whole lot room for improvement in operating systems. I'm sure not satisfied.
Assuming you started with 10.2 and not 10.1 that means over $300 worth of updates if you did them all. Were those features worth $300? Just askin'...
My company probably paid that much for keeping my OS X machines up to date and I'm going to have to say yeah, it was well worth it. At the cost of my salary, that's not a lot of hours saved by improved workflow to break even. Heck, just spotlight in the last release probably saved that much.
There is another important difference though between Windows upgrade pricing and OS upgrade pricing. With OS X I can upgrade to get a new feature if I so desire, or I can wait till the next release. With Windows, you have to wait and you can't get the upgrades incrementally. User choice is the benefit. You decide at what point the new feature set is worth the price to you.
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Surely it is time to recognize that a plethora of guns results in a glut of gun crime?
Sigh. What sort of rational person cares about "gun crime?" Unless you've been listening to political talking points I can't even fathom your point of view. The relevant question is: does the availability of guns result in more or less violent crime and human suffering? Who cares if you're shot or killed with a pipe bomb if you're just as dead?
The individual American is not stupid, but the American society is being hoodwinked.
Or... just possibly... you're incorrect in your opinions?
We, in the 95% of the world that is not from the USA (i.e. the very great majority) wait in despair for you, as a society to grow up, and drop the almost childish desire for arms, exchanging it for an adult acceptance of the world's dangers.
Speaking for the world in general is a dangerous thing. Were you talking about Sweden perhaps, or Switzerland, or many of the other places with some of the best living conditions in the world and also with similar rates of gun ownership? Speaking for the world, I'd also like to welcome the US to more modern practices and a less violent and dangerous society. People of the US, keep your guns, but decriminalize recreation drugs, implement socialized medicine, and mitigate the enormous wealth disparity. Greatly reduce crime rates with these tactics as many other countries already have. Do not, however, bother listening to "jdkk" who is way off base.
Gun-licensed countries -- practically those with bans have far far lower crime.
Both of the links you provided do not support your assertion. Both articles reference gun crime only. Yes, violent crime with guns decreases as laws make guns less available, but in general violent crime in those localities increases overall. So if your goal is to stop people from being murdered with guns, then yup gun bans help. If, however, you have the more sensible goal of stopping people from being murdered in general, then no they don't make sense.
I know it's idealistic but I would like it if NO ONE other than police & Military had guns.
Because you trust the military and police more than the average person? Do you know many people in either group?
Has anyone ever heard of a drive by stabbing?
Even assuming you could make all guns not owned by the police and military vanish and stop any more from ever entering the country you would succeed only in increasing violent crime. Look at South America and the devastating results of drive by pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails. More innocent bystanders are hit by shrapnel or seriously burned by these less directed attacks than by drive by shootings
I won't have a gun in my house.
Good for you. You choosing not to have one and I choosing to have one is called "freedom." You see, we each make the choice we think is right. Laws stopping either of us from making this choice is the lack of freedom.
It offends me that I "need to have a gun" because this nation has made it so easy for criminals to get them.
So what? Most of the country does not want to quadruple taxes to pay for enough police officers all the time to stop people from illegally getting guns. Even if they did, strict gun control statistically correlates with a slight increase in overall violent crime, especially beatings and a medium to large increase in robberies. What you are offended by (or should be) is the combination of human nature and society that motivates people to commit violence in the first place. Guns are an intermediate step. If you want to solve the real problem figure out why people commit violence and why they don't.
The argument that we need to be able to defend ourselves against our government is ridiculous, how well does a machine gun do against a cruise missile?
Ask the vietnamese. Small arms are an effective weapon in a civil war and greatly decrease the risk of an oppressive totalitarian regime by increasing the danger to those instituting such a system. If the government fires a cruise missile in downtown Washington DC, they just made more rebels than they killed including, perhaps, some of the soldiers being ordered to do it. A soldier who may be willing to go arrest a 16 year old kid for protesting because his freedom of speech has been taken away, may be a lot less willing to risk getting shot at while trying to kill a 16 year old kid who is fighting to regain his freedom of speech. It would be nice to think that an American soldier would do the right thing in either case, but the reality is something else.
If humans would spend as much time, money, and effort with feeding children as they are with giving third world countries hand cranked computers with pretty picture interfaces, the world would be a better place.
A smart businessman looks for return on investment. Right now many countries spend huge amounts providing food to other countries. This investment is much larger than the OLPC project. The food donated in this way destroys the local market for food, decimating the remains of the agricultural sector (the only real industry in many places) and making them dependent upon future handouts. The way around this is to provide them with more the the results of an industry, but with all the tools and knowledge necessary to build the industry from scratch. For agriculture that can compete, this means the entire industrial base to make farm equipment, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, GM foods, etc. This investment would be huge, but some level of it is provided in some places. Alternately, for a relatively tiny investment we can provide them with all the tools and knowledge needed to compete in the computer/intellectual property market. The OLPC project gives them everything needed to gain education and learn to create applications and information on computers.
Thank you for the green foot pedal computer with the fishes on the screen! I wish I could eat them...I am so hungry...
Sorry, but your world view is out of date. For the most part, people do have food. They just don't have jobs so they can build a life... partly because we gave them food. It is humane to give starving people food, but it is much better to give starving people both food and a means of making money so they can buy their own food in future.
The term "aqua" is used by different people to refer to different bits of OS X. In this case it seems they were using it to refer to the look and feel of the UI. Since Leopard includes a resolution independent UI and taking advantage of that requires vector graphics for elements and also may warrant some other changes to take advantage of this feature, it is almost a given that Apple will update the look and feel along with the new graphics, rather than creating vector version of the old ones.
But they're still nuts, because they can marshall these cogent, well-reasoned, well-documented arguments against gun control, and tell you why the 2nd Amendment is necessary for freedom, but they consider anyone who supports any of the other nine amendments to be godless liberal hippies who hate America.
You have just demonstrated the logical fallacy of argument by association. I do not believe you have psychic powers sufficient that you know what everyone who you label a "gun nut" believes. I don't believe that "most people" all hold the same beliefs about various rights. What you are doing is the same as people have done throughout history. You are arguing against a hypothetical person and the beliefs you assume this person holds as a representative of a huge group of individuals. By demonizing that person, you then try to justify your support or lack of support when you admit that is unethical.
Uh huh, and other countries that don't have gun bans are just as prevalent to violent crime as the US [/sarcasm]. The US has the highest number of murders/violent deaths in any western country by far, and (apart from canada) is the only one with such easy availability of guns.
Actually, if you objectively researched this it is obviously not the case. Some of the countries with the lowest violent crime have nearly as high of gun ownership as the US. If you are serious about educating yourself instead of trying to find support for the opinion you already have take a look at the real correlations between violent crime and other criteria. You'll see that as potential remedies you'd first want to consider socialized healthcare, decriminalization of recreational drugs (not necessarily legalization), and reduced wealth disparity via either the aforementioned socialism perhaps combined with progressive inheritance taxes. Looking at the numbers that have not been discredited by peer review you'll actually see a slight negative correlation between gun ownership levels and violent crime.
Now I'm not saying that guns are responsible for all the shootings, but taking them away is the easiest deterrant to stop stupid/violent/desperate people from going on shooting rampages or holding up liquor stores - it's either that or a nation-wide stability test with the mandatory jailing of those who fail.
You assert this, but I've never seen data to support it. Usually what happens in the case of a new gun ban is a slight decrease in crimes committed with guns with a medium sized increase in violent crimes committed with other weapons and a large increase in robberies. If your goal is to stop gun crimes, great, but you'll have done so while creating a net increase in violent crime in general. Trying to stop a crime by attacking one of the tools is idiotic in my opinion. You need to address the motivations for said crimes to effect a real change. Enough robberies already occur with illegally purchased guns or with other implements so that for the typical criminal, fewer legal guns actually gives them more motivation not less. Think about it from their point of view. They don't think they'll be caught and punished or they wouldn't do it in the first place. Since most don't have a legal gun and even if they do committing a crime with it is an additional crime, how does banning guns deter them? If anything it reduces one motivation to not commit a robbery, that being the chances that they will be shot by a store owner.
In fact, we (Australia) relatively recently (roughly 10 years ago) had a national gun ban scheme... we've seen a MASSIVE drop in the number of murders per year.
That makes one data point, but have you actually looked at the available data set from around the world? Have you looked at the changes to the other, correlative items I mentioned? How have they changed over that time. Finally, while I'm not overly familiar with Australia in general, I do remember seeing a piece about politically motivated, drastic changes to the way they recorded and reported violent crime statistics, making some of the claims of a large drop very questionable.
Whatever the case, from my look at the data and the studies I've read I think you're wrong about gun control as an effective means of motivating decreased crime. Further, I think there are a lot easier and less socially dangerous changes to initiate, if people would only educate themselves on the issues.
Let's hope we just did that, because if we don't turn around now, we'll crash, and we'll crash bad.
I'd argue that we're experiencing the fallout of the wealth disparity right now. We have a huge portion of our society in prison and spend more money trying to enforce the prohibition on illicit drugs than it would take to provide health care and free eduction to the entire country. I don't suspect electing democrats or republicans will make much difference since both are getting to power by a system that ensures corruption (elected with campaign contributions from lobbyists). This redirects, to some degree, the will of the people and endangers the system as a whole. The chances of it being replaced with something better are pretty slim as I see them.
Either at the point where people flee this country to get basic services, or at the point where we vote in communists and start executing the rich, or both.
As for "communists" I'm always leery of the term. Communism has been the subject of so much propaganda and fear tactics that rational discourse on the subject is rare. Here's an interesting assertion, the US has always practiced communism on such a wide scale that almost ever person in the country has participated. Let me explain. Communism is simply a group sharing some or all resources and collectively making decisions about the use of those resources. The most common communist cell in the US is a family. Rarely does a family live each in their own home, buying groceries, phone lines, cars, TVs, etc. separately. On such a small scale, sharing and collectively making decisions about resources is a no-brainer. Most people never even consider an alternative.
Now when most people think of the term "communist" they think of communist extremists who advocated enormous communist cell sizes, often encompassing entire nations. At that scale the resources saved by sharing and removing duplication are overshadowed by the dangers of unmotivated decision making and the threat of totalitarianism from the takeover of that already consolidated decision making. It simply does not work. In between lies a middle ground. The question an economist asks is not "should we be communists" but "what is the ideal communist cell size for us." In the US cells are shrinking from traditional sizes as nontraditional families become more common and they are growing from traditional sizes as extended families regain popularity due to economic hardship. Even larger communist cell sizes in the form of communes and monasteries actually provide some of the best living conditions in the US, by some people's opinions.
To further complicate the issue, there is socialism, which many people think is the same thing as communism. It is not. It is the society as a whole gathering up resources and spending them collectively. In the US this is education, welfare, medicare, military expenses, police, roads, prisons, etc. Again, no sensible economist asks if we should be socialists, but how much socialism is ideal and how it should be collected and directed.
I'd be interested to read more about that particular case study.
Try Google for "Muhammad Yunus." He won the nobel peace prize this year for the economic study to which I was referring.
One important difference however is the fact that you say it's a loan. When those people receive $27 dollars, I assume they have to pay it back.
Well it was $27 for the whole village, not for each person. Basically he found that he could pay off one person's debt which they spent their entire life paying interest on for only a few dollars, so he just gave them the money needed and changed the entire village's economy. Later he came up with the idea of loaning tiny amounts to 5 individuals with no interest in a locality and then when they repaid it, the money was loaned to someone else in the same place. This provided them with social pressure from their neighbors to pay off the loans. It has worked amazingly well.
Taxing the rich and redistributing their assets doesn't sound like a loan to me though. It sounds like a handout.
Ever heard the phrase "it takes money to make money?" Economists call this the monetary condensation principal. I'm born to a poor family. I work hard go to college buy a home and make all the right economic choices. Over the course of my life nearly half my earnings are spent paying interest on loans for college and that home. That is the best case scenario. At the same time another person is born into a rich family and inherits a few million bucks. They never have to work a day in their life because by proxy they are loaning me the money to go to college and buy a home and collecting interest. I work hard. They don't work. My hard work and circumstance pays them as much money as it does me. Over the long haul this means money consolidates and a very few people have larger and larger shares of the pie while the majority spend more and more of their income paying interest to those few. Usually this ends with a bloody revolution when the poor are tired of it.
Everyone starting out equally is not a handout. Obviously 100% inheritance tax and everyone starting with the same stake in life would require enormous changes to society, but simply taxing the inheritance from the very rich provides most of the benefit with a lot less complex meddling from the government.
Those people will need another handout next month. And the next. Unless people are forced to use those funds for education or in some other way improve their status, the money will end up right back in the hands of the wealthy.
Perhaps that is so and perhaps not. The thing is, most people don't have much of a chance. I described my economics earlier and $20K to start out would easily save me $60K in interest over my lifetime. Most people need more financial education and credit cards suck a lot more money from the poor and give it to the rich than college and home loans do. All of it, however, is the end result of wealth disparity and most wealth disparity is the result of inheritance. And I'm not asking that wealth disparity be abolished. It is a good thing in principal because it motivates innovation and hard work. The problem is due to wealth condensation wealth disparity increased due not to hard work, but simply due to circumstance. This retards innovation and removes the incentive for hard work. I say let a child of a millionaire inherit $100K and they will have incentive to do something with their life and work hard, benefiting society. Likewise let the child of a destitute woman in Detroit inherit $10K from that same millionaire and have enough money to pay for an apartment for a while while they go to school without having to spend the rest f their life paying off the debt it generates.
Actually no. If you look at the US over the past 150 years it has gone up and down between decades. In point of fact, the disparity is about the same today as it was 100 years ago.
150 years seems like a cherry picked number. It coincides with the end of slavery in the US, which was a revolution of sorts and one of the violent upheavals where wealth was forcibly redistributed. It was followed by quite a bit of progress as the descendants of the freed gained on the rest of society. If you look at the last 50 years, however, you'll see most estimates show wage disparity has about doubled and wealth disparity tripled.
First, these countries with "higher standards of living" are small, essentially homogoneous, and have economies that are largely dependent on extraction of natural resources (and much less so with developing new technologies, medicines, services, etc).
The first point you bring up is a myth, long ago put to rest, I'd thought. As for the economies, they vary quite a bit as does the nature of their stance on technology and employment.
Second, the "higher standards of living" are essentially defined by arbitrary equations and do not necessarily tell you the complete picture
True, enough, but they are the best consensus we have.
Third, just because you think it "works" for them, does not mean they did better under these systems.
Since we have historical records of numerous localities that have changed their economic policies over time we have some pretty well normalized ideas about how certain economic policies are likely to effect other "quality of living issues." For example, if you are looking at violent crime you'll see the single strongest correlation between it and any other factor anyone has documented is wealth disparity. I don't know a serious sociologist that has even argued this in decades.
Fourth, you seem to assume that equality itself should be the end goal and not actual absolute improvement overtime.
Not at all. I argue that if you're looking to promote the greater good for the most people we should look to a certain level of socialism and communism; enough to balance out wealth condensation and keep the society stable and nonviolent, while not so much that it has a damping effect upon growth and innovation. The US has practiced socialism in the form of education, police, roads, industry subsidies, welfare, social security, prisons, and military for a long time. The level of this socialism is not particularly low, but it is directed in different ways than seem ideal. The US has historically practiced communism on the level of small communities and nuclear and extended families. That communist cell size has been shrinking (although with current trends are moving away from the nuclear family and towards both smaller and larger cells).
From a purely economic standpoint then, looking to "tweak the system" so to speak, I'd look to directing more health care, education, and welfare and away from prisons and industry subsidies. I'd further drastically increase the inheritance tax on the very high end and could be fairly well assured that there would be a corresponding drop in violent crime. I'd move towards more capitalism by removing strict government prohibitions on certain markets like recreational drugs. All these policies have had very positive results elsewhere and likely would in the US.
Your example is very much detached from reality. The great majority of wealth does not lie with the uber-uber-rich (billionaires), but from the lesser known multi-millionaires and millionare variety. There are only about 700 billionaires in the US (with an average networth of ~3.2b). Presuming your wet-dream could materialize and you could liquidate the assets of these billionaires at 100% all at once (ignoring for a minute that they'd have to die and that most of their wealth is just on paper), that would only give those 100m "poor" about 22K per person. This is hardly enough for anyone
If the wealth of the millionaire were essentially illegitimate, the state would not need any further rationale for his expropriation. On the other hand, if he were in some sense entitled to his astounding fortune, what moral arguments could yet be brought to bear that would override his right to property?
I reject the ethical argument that a person is entitled to inheritance since historically there has never been a zeroing of wealth followed by fair dealings which led to its distribution. Wealth has been distributed as far back as we know by people killing, robbing, enslaving etc. Should one person be born to riches while another is born to debt simply because 500 years ago the ancestors of one slaughtered the ancestors of another and the profit of that crime was never returned and has been gaining the evildoer's ancestors interest ever since?
No the moral high ground is a swamp so economy needs to be a matter of practicality that brings benefit to the people in general. As such it is certainly the place of the state to govern and restrict inheritance as much as is beneficial for society.
You seem to think that most wealthy people are that way because they inherited it. Less than 20% of millionaires inherited their wealth.
Your numbers are misleading because while true, they sidestep the issue. If 50% of the wealth is controlled by 2% of the people, the question is, how many of that 2% inherited versus made it through hard work from a modest start? Switching from worldwide numbers to the US, because I happen to have read those numbers for the US and have never seen them on a worldwide basis, I think it was less than 1 in 20 of the top 1.5% of the US which control hugely disproportionate amounts of money did not have a parent in that 1.5%. Statistically speaking the way to be wealthy is to have been born wealthy. We'd all like for the American dream of hard work leading to success to hold true, but realistically it is not the case most of the time. Circumstances of birth are more important that genetics, education, or hard work.
You split 8B between 100M people, that's $80 each. Are you saying everyone would be significantly better off if they had just $80 more?
Yes, actually. If you've ever read about microloans that are having a huge impact on Africa, an individual turned a village of 42 people from perpetual debt to profitability with only $27 dollars. The most popular of these programs now offer loans in the range of $25-$500 in much of the third world. That is not to say $80 would be enough everywhere, or that it needs to be evenly distributed, only that it is enough to make a huge difference to the poorest people and that is the ballpark sort of figures we should be looking at.
Your comment does not really deserve a reply being a joke and redundant at the same time, but if you've seen Apple's recent mice I'd say they are of the same mentality as the Wiimote. That is to say, they are designed to be easy and accessible to everyone and to encourage developers to do the right thing. At the same time, they can easily enable power users to have the myriad buttons they need and want. In fact, Apple's "mighty mouse" is the only mouse I've ever seen where a shared computer can have one hardware mouse with one button for kids and novices and multiple buttons for expert users. I've seen firsthand what happens when novice users try to operate one of those four button designs favored by power users and I've cursed at trying to use the same mouse (as I'm accustomed to three or more). I find it sad that people still drag this old horse out of the closet, even if they're trying to be funny.
After the cell processor was more or less confirmed to win the battle for the console, but before Apple announced the switch to Intel this move seemed like a no-brainer. A virtual Nintendo console built into every mac would have been a real win. Now, however, the development for both the Wii and the Mac virtual console might be too hard. If Apple, Nintendo, and Sony were willing to shake hands in order to deliver a combined kick to Microsoft's groin they could to it as follows: build a single development platform on top of OpenGL and similar technologies that allow a game developer to target the Wii, Mac, Linux, Windows, and PS3 with minimal effort. Promote it like hell and hand it out to every college student everywhere. All the players are already behind OpenGL in one way or another. This would have a similar, but more widespread effect and threaten some of MS's lock-in with respect to their crown jewels (Windows). But then I've always been one of those "a strong offense..." types.
You can take somebody's money because... it is advantageous for you to do so? (Isn't there a word for people who do that?)
Freedom fighters?
Look, life isn't fair. Some people are born smarter or better looking than others. There is not a lot society can do about that. On the extremes, socialism usually serves to temper the harshness, the mentally handicapped are fed and clothed and the disfigured are given what surgeries are possible to help them live a normal life. With wealth, however, the disparity is wholly the creation of society. One person inherits 8 billion dollars and never works a day in their life. Another is born into $180 of debt and spends the rest of their life working as a slave unable to pay off the interest on it. No one in their right mind thinks that is fair. Worse yet, from an economics perspective, in a purely capitalist system this disparity continually increases. Historically, this increases until the majority are in such bad shape they revolt, kill the wealthy and redistribute it. Then the cycle begins again.
Modern economies have established a better balance of capitalism, socialism, and communism. In some of the places with the highest standards of living you'll find socialism that effectively negates the wealth condensation principal. That is to say, wealth disparity is not increasing in those places. This is usually accomplished by socialized healthcare, education and progressive inheritance taxes. In the above extreme example, imagine if instead of inheriting 8 billion dollars, our privileged child inherited 50 million dollars. The rest of the wealth was redistributed to those born incredibly poor. So now you have one person still obscenely wealthy who never has to work a day in their life and 100 million people who would have been born into perpetual debt, each with a sufficiently large stake to begin life with a small farm to work or a little shop. As a result, maybe some of those people don't rise up and kill the son of the privileged and simply take the money to be less equitably redistributed.
The principal is hard to argue against, it is simply a matter of establishing the ideal balance. The problem being, the laws are not actually created democratically by and for the people, in most cases, but instead are created by the ultra wealthy. Just take a look at how many people in the top levels of our government were not born into that inherited aristocracy.
This might work to some degree, but a lot of security problems occur in situations where there are warnings. All it takes is for an application to tell users, "This won't work unless you say 'ok'," and people will click on 'ok'. It might not make sense, but people don't understand computers to begin with, so if their spyware-toting emoticon program tells them to do something, they'll often do it.
Yes, this is true, especially for Windows users. Windows has ignored the UI component of security to an absurd degree. If you ever see the choice (OK)(Cancel) then the OS has failed. This is a system that operant conditions people to click "OK." Every dialogue box should be useful, their appearance should be rare, every comment should be in plain English, and every button should be an action unique to that dialogue, like "allow this program to send mail" instead of "OK."
In order to be reasonably successful, the ACL would need to be lenient enough that, indeed, it almost never triggered a user prompt. If users get prompted for half of their installations, they'll start clicking 'ok' out of habit.
Yeah, users should always have to read the button to decide which option to pick. As for the rarity, they need to be rare and so do other dialogue boxes. A start would be removing all the dialogues that only have the option "OK" as they are useless and don't give the user any choice. They serve only to make other dialogues less effective. Realistically, however, most people do not install many items of software on their computers, so this sort of a prompt would be fairly rare for the average user. It will take some time to uncondition everyone, but the sooner we start the sooner it will make a real difference.
In order to be reasonably successful, the ACL would need to be lenient enough that, indeed, it almost never triggered a user prompt. If users get prompted for half of their installations, they'll start clicking 'ok' out of habit.
Agreed. On Windows, Microsoft needs to bend over backwards to make such a system available to all developers and certifiers, including open source projects by default if they wish to avoid breaking antitrust law. I have no confidence at all that they will do this however. Luckily, other OS's will move this way and perhaps take some market share.
And the whole thing was stupid. I was an administrator on the machine, and it just wouldn't let me do ordinary things without effort. So this, apparently, is Microsoft's solution to security: make it hard to do simple things, even if you have an administrator account.
Yeah, making risky behaviors difficult is a flawed security design. The projects that have implemented this so far, like Solaris, SELinux, TrustedBSD, etc. have taken care to make sure the user can alter the default trust levels for different types of software and override those defaults for any given software, without any difficulty. I'm actually counting on Apple to do this properly and then have other's copy the UI they develop for it. They had documents about a MAC and application signing framework in their OS X 10.5 info for developers right up until two days ago when it vanished from their site. Hopefully this does not mean the feature was yanked, but only hidden until the announcement.
So services and programs either have access to user files or they don't.
That level of security granularity is no longer sufficient on Windows due to the high malware rate. The access should be calculated based upon a number of factors. First a given service or program should be granted a trust level based upon if it was a pre-instal app, signed and certified app from a given authority, signed app, or unsigned app. These should correspond to a default ACL for access to files and other resources. A good default for a signed but not certified app, might be access only to files that program itself created. Further, each program's ACL needs to be customizable. When a program wants to exceed its ACL, the user needs to be informed and asked. This should be a pretty rare occurrence for most users. "The program "IE_porn_toolbar6" wants access to access your e-mail address book This program is signed as belonging to "donkeysystems.net" but has not been certified as safe by anyone. (Stop it from accessing my e-mail addresses)(Let it read them once, but not write to them)(Let it read and write my e-mail addresses whenever it wants)(Advanced options)."
You'll note how the above message would not be triggered by 99% or more of even unsigned applications that are not malware and how the message is delivered in plain English with actions for buttons. This basic concept is a mixture of Application Signing and Mandatory Access Controls. Neither is widely used but the underlying plumbing has been available for many years. If MS had any motivation to solve their malware problem, this would take care of most of it.
You are one misplaced password prompt away...
You know it actually lends you credibility when you say, "I was wrong and I admit it" when you are caught making factually incorrect statements.
Are you suggesting that Linux doesn't have a relatively tiny number of ignorant users ? Or that OS X doesn't have a relatively tiny market share ? Or are you arguing these two aspects of "security" are not significant ?
I'm suggesting that no one has ever presented any evidence that marketshare is a significant contributing factor to the security of those platforms, or (if it is significant) how significant that one factor is.
Neither OS X, nor the vast majority of Linux installations, "contain trojans" in any meaningful way.
True, but neither most OS X machines nor most Linux machines are constantly being infected by trojans, so there isn't a lot of demand. It would be nice if the features used to contain trojans became more widespread and integrated on those platforms, but doing so is proactive security addressing a problem that has not really materialized yet. Not implementing them on Windows is simply negligence and lack of motivation on the part of MS.
Being that psychic OSes are still a ways off, I daresay you'll be waiting a while for the OS that "works properly for said user".
Why, OS X works properly for most people in this regard. So does Linux. It is simply a matter of giving the user enough information about what is happening and the right controls to do what they want for the tasks they normally do. There is no technical barrier to that. Psychic abilities are not needed as there are these things called mice, keyboards, and monitors.
An Operating System does not - and can not - know what the user *wants to do*. It only knows what the user has *told it to do*.
No, this is untrue. The OS knows what both the user and the OS programmer told it to do. Most users know nothing of the default settings on their computers, but they still function. In any case the problem is not one of the computer needing to do something neither the user or programmer has not told it, but of the OS needing the ability to do what the user tells it as well as the ability to inform the user when it does things.
So are Apple going to break all those old, unsigned legacy applications by stopping unsigned code from doing anything interesting, or are programs still going to be able to do pretty much anything they want ?
This is called a false dichotomy. We don't yet know what Apple is going to do, but you can bet it won't be either of the above. Most programs don't want to perform the behavior of malware, so simply restricting those behaviors by default will "break" only a few legacy apps. And by "break" I mean ask the user what they want it to be able to do and then do what the user tells it.
Here's the problem with going down the path of signed apps and strict controls (which is probably the closest thing to a real, workable "security improvement" I think I've ever seen you suggest): to be effective, it must lock out pretty much any software that doesn't originate from high profile, professional, commercial software developers, released after those strict controlers were implemented.
No it does not. Microsoft will probably got that route because it may profit them, but there is no motivation for other's to do so. Apple can maintain their own certificate signing authority and even package repository if they want. There is nothing to prevent users from adding more certifiers at whatever trust level they want. There is nothing stopping users from changing these levels for completely unsigned applications in general or for a given application. Even if a user runs a completely unsigned application they get in their e-mail, there is no reason to stop it from running by default. It can just be sandboxed so it needs explicit approval, with warnings to the user, if it tries to touch anything important or be
Yes, I can. Mac OS X, for example.
Oh, I'm not arguing that OS X's implementation is ideal, merely that this functionality should be universal. More important than any individual function like spell checking or grammar checking is the ability for arbitrary functions to be shared.
A much more important question is: why are you running random programs off the Internet?
Because it is the only way to get my job done. Programs from companies I don't trust, like Microsoft and Adobe are essential to my continued employment and there are no equivalent programs I trust. Even many open source projects have never been audited by anyone other than the original author. For all I know, they contain code to backdoor by computer.
It makes sense for trusted programs to have easy access to your address book...
No, it makes sense for me to be able to allow a program I trust access to my address book. It does not make sense for any program not pre-installed to have access by default unless there is some mechanism by which it can be considered trusted by automated policies.
And this is why security on computers sucks today. The mindset of "what users do is wrong lets change them" instead of figuring out what tasks users want to accomplish and designing the OS to let them do it securely. To maintain that an "all or nothing' security scheme is workable in this day of abundant malware is an absurdly bad idea.
It's not normal for me. ;)
I don't know any major or even relatively major OS that gets managing applications right. OS X and Windows Lack a universal update system for applications. Windows and Linux lack ubiquitous, portable, compartmentalized applications. I think if someone merged the functionality of a good package manager, with an automated build process, with OpenStep we'd be pretty close to ideal functionality, but so far no one has.
All of this simply serves to reinforce my point, no OS's are not perfect and there is a lot of room for improvement.
I don't normally reply to my own posts, but I thought it might be interesting to note that apparently Apple pulled the mention of this feature from their Website. I don't know if that means it is not going to be in Leopard or if they're just keeping it all secret.
Like the one where the new Japanese digital camera chic could talk to the Mac but no tto the PC. Huh? Show me one digital camera available at the time of that commercial that did not work with a PC. Seriously...
Actually, my older camera did not work out of the box with either my brother's laptop or my friend's desktop when we tried to grab pictures from it. We had to download drivers to get it working in one case and gave up in the other. It did work just fine without installing any drivers on my mac laptop and my other friend's mac tower.
What can I do with it?
This is often an issue for people trying a new platform. They don't have a purpose and they don't plan to use it as their everyday machine. They don't need it at all. I've heard the same comment about Windows and Linux. So I Installed Vista on my MacBook Pro, and I can watch a DVD or something, but I'm not a PC gamer so what can I do with it?
Anyway... I think some people who might consider a Mac are seeign some of these ads and not believing them. Yes, PCs ARE fun. Yes, cameras work with Windows. Why are you fibbing to me?
Wait you believe some of the stuff you see on TV... during ads? Wow, we live in different worlds.
That seems wierd - perhaps it's the age of the iBook you got or the projector you own. My old Powerbook 667 MHz has never had problems with any projectors and I know my current Macbook can hook right into 1080p displays from experience.
Old ibooks only supported monitor mirroring, rather than multiple independent displays. As such, it would have restricted to the resolution of the ibook screen, unless he applied a firmware hack.
I feel like we've reached a design plateau with both Windows XP and MacOSX these days. They both do what they do extremely well, and most of the other needs can be satisfied by the applications themselves without changing the OS.
I strongly disagree. The progress in the OS field has been slow, but there is plenty of room for growth. OS X has numerous features that are part of and should be part of the OS that have not yet made their way to Windows. For example, system level services. Can you believe there are still OS's without spellchecking, grammar checking, etc. in all programs that use text? Also, there is the area of application management and security. By default some random program off the internet has access to read my e-mail address book and start sending mail? And someone thinks this is acceptable? There is no universal update service to keep all my software current and that is normal?
There is a whole lot room for improvement in operating systems. I'm sure not satisfied.
Assuming you started with 10.2 and not 10.1 that means over $300 worth of updates if you did them all. Were those features worth $300? Just askin'...
My company probably paid that much for keeping my OS X machines up to date and I'm going to have to say yeah, it was well worth it. At the cost of my salary, that's not a lot of hours saved by improved workflow to break even. Heck, just spotlight in the last release probably saved that much.
There is another important difference though between Windows upgrade pricing and OS upgrade pricing. With OS X I can upgrade to get a new feature if I so desire, or I can wait till the next release. With Windows, you have to wait and you can't get the upgrades incrementally. User choice is the benefit. You decide at what point the new feature set is worth the price to you.